


Seeds

by foojules



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, New Parent Jitters, Post-Canon, Pregnancy, commitment issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-13 00:56:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7955839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foojules/pseuds/foojules
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agnieszka is soon to give birth, but she's not sure Sarkan's ready to be a father...until he shows her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeds

**Author's Note:**

> I'm in love with this book and wanted to hang out in its world for a little longer. Thanks for reading...hope you enjoy!

I was surprised, but not very, at the way Sarkan seemed to find my new shape more alluring than otherwise. Pregnancy made me even less careful about my appearance than usual, but he’d long since despaired of tidying me up. And it did have its own kind of order: a life constructing itself within my body, part by part in a defined process. Though I doubted that was entirely why he couldn’t keep his hands off me.

He’d shown up at my cottage bearing a blanket of thick, cloud-soft wool (winter was coming, he said, and he wanted to make sure I was warm enough, never mind that I was perfectly capable of making what I needed) and things had inevitably led to other things, and now I was lying on my back on that blanket while those hands gently pushed my thighs apart.

I sighed and closed my eyes, settling my shoulders more deeply into the wool pile. His hand came up between my legs—a soft, almost teasing stroke of his fingertips—and my shudder, out of all proportion to the lightness of the touch, made him chuckle. He kissed the inside of my thigh just above my knee. I let a little smile of anticipation come to my face as he worked his way up and up, and then further up, to my rounded belly. I didn’t mind; it was all part of the journey.

But then instead of just giving my belly a kiss and moving back down, he laid his ear against it as though he were listening for a far-off signal. He stayed like that for so long it brought a question to the surface of my mind, one that had been there almost since I’d become aware of the life quickening within me. I hadn’t asked it out loud. I told myself I didn’t really need to know the answer, because the life was there no matter how he felt about it. But his sudden stillness, his solemnity, created a silence that could only be filled one way.

“Are you glad?” I asked, just as he lifted his head and began to kiss his way downward.

He stopped short. I gave a small sigh of disappointment; Sarkan could do such wonderful things with his mouth. But now that I’d voiced it, I couldn’t let it go, and I knew he wouldn’t either. “That we’re having a child,” I clarified. “Are you glad?”

He sat up and gave me one of his baffled looks, edged with annoyance. “Of all the asinine—what kind of question is that?”

Something inside me crumbled, a little. “One with a simple answer, I would think,” I snapped. I extricated my limbs from his and got up, a little too ponderously for it to be the rebuke I would have liked, and snatched my wrap around me. Going to the door, I opened it and stood in the doorway. The Wood stayed green and lush much later into the season than a normal forest, and the leaves were just beginning to turn into an almost obscenely bright mosaic of red and yellow and orange, but the air had a bite to it. I forced myself not to shiver. Letting my eyes roam over the shifting tangle of vines and branches beyond the edge of the clearing, I waited to feel comforted.

“Agnieszska,” Sarkan said.

I half turned my head so I could see his outline behind me, standing ramrod straight in the middle of the room. He’d conjured a dressing gown onto himself. “Yes?” I said coldly.

His hands flapped out from his sides, helpless. “It’s still a dangerous world.”

I whipped around. “What do you mean? It’s safer than it’s been in living memory.” _Thanks to the two of us, together._ “And even if there are dangers—”

“There are,” he interrupted.

“—that doesn’t mean people stop living, stop growing.”

I stared fiercely at him and he glared back, brows drawn. He wouldn’t admit I was right. “What I meant,” he bit out, “Was that if it’s irresponsible for _one_ of us to be distracted— _even now_ ,” he pressed, raising his hand to put down my protest—”Then it’s nothing short of insane for _both_ of us.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. For a long moment I just stared at him. Finally I managed to say, “If that’s how you feel, then maybe you should leave.”

“Don’t be an imbecile,” he snapped, but it sounded almost pleading.

“We can manage perfectly well without you.” I felt numb, far away from my body, like someone else was saying the words for me.

His lips thinned; his black eyes glittered and grew even blacker. I half expected him to mutter his transporting spell and disappear, and I wouldn’t have been sorry to see it. Instead, he took a sharp breath and said, “It isn’t that I don’t have an interest.”

I felt as though I was looking at him through a long tunnel, or the wrong end of a spyglass: he looked small and far away to me, getting farther every moment. How I hated him just then for his equivocating, his utter determination to stamp out the smallest spark of human feeling in himself, and I opened my mouth to tell him to _get out_ . But the baby turned within me, bringing me fully back to myself. My hands crept over my stomach. _There, there,_ I thought, to both of us.

Before I could formulate any reply he said, changing the subject abruptly, “We haven’t discussed where you’ll have the baby. Not here, surely.” He swept his arm to indicate the cottage.

“Why not?” I let myself enjoy the look of horror that came to his face for several seconds before I took pity on him. “I thought I’d go to Dvernik when my time came. I’ll have help there.”

“Then you’re not a complete idiot,” he said, but the old bite wasn’t in it. “And afterward?”

“My parents told me I'm welcome as long as I want to stay.” Sarkan’s shoulders relaxed at this, but then stiffened again when I went on: “But I’ll have to come back here. You know as well as I do that the work won’t be done for a long time.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “But even if the Wood is...friendlier now, it’s still a lonely place for a child.”

_So is a tower,_ I thought. I shrugged. “The forest was always where I was happiest.” I turned away again, to watch the late-autumn sunlight make shadow-patterns on the floor of the clearing. “Not everything has to be decided right now.”

“I won’t lie to you,” he said after a minute, almost sulkily. “I won’t pretend not to have reservations.“

“I know.” I stroked my belly. I reminded myself that this was his first time doing this, too, and becoming a father at two hundred years old was probably every bit as terrifying as doing it at twenty. “But you see,” I said mildly, “your reservations don’t mean anything to her.”

“Her?”

“Yes.” I’d been hearing her sing for the last month, felt it in the movement of her limbs even before that.

He sighed. “Will you come in and close the door? Unless you want to catch your death, and hers too.” I hesitated and he snapped, “Stop being foolish.” A soft weight fell onto my shoulders: he was wrapping the blanket he’d brought around me. He began to steer me back inside, but I wrenched my arm from his hand and slammed the door shut myself. I paced to the opposite side of the room, as far from him as I could get.

When he spoke again he sounded hesitant, like he was feeling his way between words. “I’m not...good with children.”

I almost laughed. Was that what he was worried about? Of course he wasn’t good with children. Their noise, their disorder, their dependency—they were antithetical to everything he valued. Just as I was. I turned to look at him; his gaze was riveted to the floor, his hands opening and closing at his sides, and he looked deeply uncomfortable.

“You’ll have plenty of opportunity to practice getting better,” I said, and he raised his head. A half smile birthed itself on his face. “Sarkan. It will be all right.”

“It’s possible,” he said. I took that as encouragement.

-o-

A week later I woke to one of Sarkan’s sentinels hovering around my face like a puppy wanting to go outside. “What is it?” I asked, impatient, but he hadn't put any words into it. Typical. The wisp drifted toward the door, the light reflecting iridescent off it, then back toward me, then toward the door again. A clear enough message.

“As if I’ve got nothing better to do than come whenever he summons me,” I grumbled, making my unwieldy way around the cottage. The baby’s arrival was still weeks off, but I felt as though I couldn’t possibly get any bigger without falling over. I was irritated enough to dawdle through breakfast, and after I’d eaten I needed to refill the niche outside my cottage with heart-tree fruit, which was increasingly difficult to find as the winter drew in. The wisp stayed at my heels, nervous ripples moving over its skin whenever I turned eastward away from the tower.

“I’ll get there when I get there,” I told it. By the time I’d gathered enough fruit it was time for dinner, and I wasn’t in a mood to miss any meals. I ate a thick slab of bread spread with the drippings from a rabbit stew I’d made the night before, along with two boiled eggs and one of the heart-tree fruits. I considered stopping off in Dvernik to visit my mother, but I didn’t want the wisp making her uncomfortable, so I settled for bringing my sack and doing a bit of late-season gleaning along the way. The sun was beginning its descent by the time I stood at the tower’s foot.

Sarkan fairly slammed the doors open. The sound of his boot-heels striking stone rang out as he strode furiously across the entrance hall. “Didn’t you get my summons?” he demanded, stopping in front of me. His hands were fists at his sides, as though he were trying to keep himself from taking me by the shoulders and shaking me.

“Of course,” I replied. “That’s why I’m here.”

“And you didn’t think,” he said through gritted teeth, “that it might possibly be important?”

I held his eye. “Is it?”

“Intolerable woman,” he muttered. “Come with me.” He whipped around and stomped toward the stairs. He’d long since repaired the damage from our battle with the Wood, and the tower looked as it had the first time I’d arrived: the same smooth white marble, the same untouchable, ordered beauty everywhere you looked. The same coldness.

He moved so quickly I had to trot to keep up. I was winded by the time we reached the first landing. I stopped, thinking he’d take me to the library. Maybe something had come up, I thought with a hint of unease; maybe he did need my help. But he kept going up. He turned when he noticed I was no longer with him. “Well? Are you coming?”

“I’ve got a baby the size of a pumpkin pressing against my lungs.”

He snorted and said caustically, “We’ll wait until you’re ready, then.”

When I’d caught my breath I continued up, following him into the dragon-carpeted corridor that led to his chamber. He stopped abruptly before one of the closed guest-room doors.

“What is it?” I asked, but he just indicated with a jerk of his head that I should open it. I turned the knob and stepped inside, and my mouth sagged open in wonder.

The room was filled with a soft golden light. Some of it came from the window, but the rest emanated from some ambient source I couldn’t see: the walls themselves, or the ceiling, which was painted to look like the sky. Fluffy white clouds, just beginning to be tinged pink and orange with the approaching sunset, drifted in depthless blue; and they actually _drifted_ , I saw, they were actually moving. It wasn’t just paint. A hawk flew by outside the window, its wings stretching to ride the wind, and I saw it mirrored on the wall. He’d recreated the entire valley in this room. The shifting green of the fields and forests, the villages—I stepped closer and watched a miniature peddler's wagon rumbling through Poniets and infinitesimal women washing clothes on the shore of Radomsko’s lake, their kerchiefs scraps of color—the silver ribbon of the Spindle winding into the dark Wood. The mountains dreaming to the north. The mural extended all the way down to the stone floor, which was covered in a soft fur rug. The four-poster bed that had been here before was gone, replaced with a dresser, a rocking chair, a cradle. It was a nursery.

I turned to Sarkan. He was watching my face. His eyes were wide, the creases between his brows smoothed, but I could see his jaw working. “Well?” he said in a low voice.

I was too overwhelmed to speak. He jerked his gaze away and said, “You can change the time of day, for when she sleeps.” He made a gesture and the window went opaque. The ceiling darkened, glowing with millions of tiny points of light: stars. “I’ll show you how. It’s—“

But before he could show me the spell, I had hurtled into his arms and was kissing him. His mouth felt stiff and surprised under mine; then it softened, and he kissed me back. His hands tangled in my hair. After a few moments he drew back a little, saying, “You like it.”

“It’s wonderful.” I’d spent the last week trying not to dwell on his hesitancy, his _reservations_. No matter what, I’d thought fiercely, this child would be loved. She would have a family. But I still felt weak and shaky with relief.

“There’s—more.” He took me by the hand and drew me back into the corridor. As we approached his room the hall darkened and I felt the familiar warding wind, the sense of disorientation.

“You’ll have to lift the protection spell when she starts walking,” I said.

He snorted. “No, I won’t. It’ll protect her too.” He opened his door without having to feel for the knob, as I still did sometimes even now. The transformation in here was not as complete as the nursery, but I felt my breath stop in my throat. In place of the narrow bed with its stifling red hangings, a huge expanse of mattress topped with an airy white canopy filled one side of the room. A second chair sat before the fire, carved like the first—but with vines and leaves, not claws and webbed wings, and instead of red velvet its seat cushion was a brilliant spring green.

Sarkan looked even more awkward than he had in the nursery. “This isn’t—don’t think you have to—“ he sputtered. “I know the Wood is your home.” He made an expression of distaste, and I realized just how much of of an effort it was for him to visit me there so often. He came to me much more than I went to him, which I had taken as the main reason he hadn’t made any changes to the tower before now. “But when you’re here, you might as well be comfortable. Both of you.”

I went over to the bed and climbed on top of it. I bounced a little, testing, then lay back and gazed at the linen canopy above me. Sarkan remained by the door. I curled onto my side and propped my head on my hand, looking at him. He’d affected an expression of indifference, his eyes focused on the fire rather than on me; but his shoulders were as rigid as if they’d been made of wood.

“Sarkan,” I said, feeling the magic of his name rise on my tongue as it had the first time I said it. His eyes darted toward me, and if anything he tensed up even more. I stretched out my free hand toward him. “Come here.”

He came.


End file.
